[hylafax-users] WARNING: Potential Risk With Faxsetup

["A. Kalten" <akalten@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

While doing some very quick compiling and installing
from one HylaFax version to another as part of a quick
testing process, I managed to delete my entire /tmp
directory which contained a lot of important system
files.  Fortunately, I had a backup, but since the backup
was at least 24 hours old, a few files were irrecoverable.

The culprit was the HylaFAX faxsetup script.  I don't recall
exactly what happened, but at one point I had exited the
script using the CTRL-C key.  When faxsetup was run again,
it completely removed the /tmp directory.

Faxsetup contains a variable TMPDIR which is used to
refer to a temporary storage directory.  This is a bad
choice because a system variable TMPDIR already exists.
On my system, TMPDIR = /tmp, and somehow, when faxsetup
was restarted, the value of this variable was retained.
Because this directory is removed by faxsetup, my entire
/tmp directory was deleted.

The name of this variable should be changed to TEMPDIR
or TEMP or something else that will not conflict with
the already present TMPDIR system variable.

From now on, I will manually alter this variable name to
avoid another potential disaster.

Andrew Kalten


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